17 ms·

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users

349 points by paol 6y ago

smabie 6y ago
Presumably because the ads are already hyper targeted, because the site is written in Dutch! Now imagine you run an English ad for say, a local micro brewery in LA. It's totally obvious that you don't want to waste money on people who don't drink, don't live in America, or are 12 years old. Clearly there's significant diminishing returns to how specifically you target, but it's completely ridiculous to claim that untargeted ads are even a fraction as good.
- Retric 6y ago
  It better for the people buying advertising is not the same thing as better for people selling advertising.
  - amadeuspagel 6y ago
    Yes it is. The people selling advertising aren't stupid.
    - zeepzeep 6y ago
      The smartest people in the world are trying to get you to click on an ad. Imagine what they could do.
    - Retric 6y ago
      It’s a question of how informed buyers are as information asymmetry often works in the sellers favor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry It might not always be true in every case, but in this specific case it seems to be.
      - amadeuspagel 6y ago
        But in this case, the buyer can buy from many other sellers, where they get the information they want.
        Retric 6y ago
        A segment of buyers may make that choice, but they don’t have to sell to every buyer. And again, the data backs up the assertion.
- mfontani 6y ago
  I think the implication is that using the context of the page to serve ads to users (i.e. you're reading an article on beer, so I'm serving you an ad about beers) is better than using context about the user to serve ads (i.e. you're reading an article about beers, and I'm serving you ads about that one item you've searched on Amazon last week).
  - aequitas 6y ago
    > and I'm serving you ads about that one item you've searched on Amazon last week) As a side note, Amazon is not that big yet in the Netherlands so it would probably be something searched on Bol.com. The problem I'm having with ads nowadays, besides that they are indeed often out of context, is that they are far to late and outdated. Because most times advertisements for a product start to appear when I already bought said item. So for me if they do tracing in a sense I'd rather have them double down on it and provide real 'value' to me in their ads. But I still prefer no tracking at all.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
      But they can’t predict the future so the ads will always be bad. Targeted ads would probably work best in categories of things that you buy regularly, like snacks. I’m not sure how they’d get that sort of information though.
      - fendy3002 6y ago
        Or restaurants / food chains. One for sure is to target people (esp teenagers / working age) who search for malls, parks or shopping districts.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > Targeted ads would probably work best in categories of things that you buy regularly, like snacks. If you show me an ad for something I already buy regularly, are you hoping it will cause me to increase my habitual amount? That doesn't really sound like an effective ad.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- learnstats2 6y ago
  Are you trying to say that the 24 million Dutch-speaking people are all adults who drink?
  - eru 6y ago
    Some of them are children who drink. (But they can only drink in private with eg their parents. Purchases are limited to 18+ year olds.)
    - irishsultan 6y ago
      16+ year olds for about 6 million speakers of Dutch
      - eru 6y ago
        They recently changed the law and increased minimum purchasing age to 18.
        irishsultan 6y ago
        Not according to this site: https://www.vlaanderen.be/regels-voor-verkoop-van-alcohol https://www.vlaanderen.be/regels-voor-verkoop-van-alcohol
        eru 6y ago
        That's a Belgian site. I am going by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age and their sources. If that's wrong, please correct the Wikipedia page.
        irishsultan 6y ago
        I was talking about Belgium (note how that site is in Dutch and the number of 6 million approx. matches the number of people speaking Dutch in Belgium, while it doesn't match the number of people speaking Dutch in the Netherlands at all).
- simias 6y ago
  The Nederlands are obviously tiny compared to the USA but an untargetted ad for a micro-brewery in Rotterdam is going to have a massive miss ratio. "People who speak Dutch" is in no way "hyper targeted".
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    Exactly you have to consider Flemish speakers in Belgium and you might even have a nl-nl page and be-nl page. Flemish doesn't have it's own language code BTW
- treeman79 6y ago
  Often hyper targeted ads are effective but the ad manager can’t spend their budget due to small audience size. Also anti bot tactics will cut down on ads served. Sometimes manager is willing to lose efficiency for more overall exposure.
- contravariant 6y ago
  There's a pretty significant difference between tracking and targetting. It's pretty easy to limit an ad to a geographic area and target audience (to some degree of accuracy), you don't need to store any personal information to achieve this. However that is very different from tracking someone's identity to figure out their date of birth, nationality, and whether they drink alcohol.
- brnt 6y ago
  The Netherlands are small, but not that small ;) Not all New Yorkers will be lumped in a single group either, right?
- levosmetalo 6y ago
  If top HN comment completely misses the point on targeting and shows zero understanding what does it mean, and also considers "site is in Dutch" as "hyper targeted" what chance have an average marketer to properly set targeting goal for an ad? Average site can profit more from untargeted ads than from the wrongly targeted ads set by the "ad experts", especialy after saving the costs of hiring such "experts".
  - libertine 6y ago
    Funny or not, you have to take into account HN context (ah!), where the great majority of users thinks marketing is a scam and hate advertising (here comes the downvotes...) - and they have reasons to feel like that. We've been flooded by bad professionals that give a bad rep to the craft. They can profit more because they don't need any third party tech provider that take bites out of their inventory margin, or are not being forced into bidding their inventory and they set the prices they want. It's smart on the publisher part, but they end up falling into 3rd parties because of the times they have inventory not being monetized (money lost).
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      That's the concerning part. For centuries publications sourced ads to finance them just by themselves. But suddenly we got those worldwide ad auction houses that monopolize the market, and now nobody can source their own ads anymore, because the buyers are all on the auction houses. They shouldn't have more unsold inventory than if they got the alternative.
      - Spooky23 6y ago
        You make a good point about the marketplace dictating the market. In my hometown there is a weekly newspaper that is still going strong, that can support a half dozen employees, etc. All with direct ads for B2C and B2B local businesses and legal notices. It's interesting, as that business model would absolutely not work with an online platform, as it's a general interest publication that's highly local. There's no way for the local high-tensile fence contractor or well digger to generate ROI on Google. Ditto with the supermarket -- the weekly ad in the Sunday paper is very effective IMO, and superior to the online presentation in almost every way.
- edoloughlin 6y ago
  Presumably because the ads are already hyper targeted, because the site is written in Dutch! Presumably the site was also written in Dutch before they stopped tracking users?
- rightbyte 6y ago
  You need to take into account what Google charges for giving you the opportunity for somewhat accurately targeted ads. Clearly, it can be cheaper to just show ads for everyone if Googles fees are to high for the value Google provide.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Why would it be a waste of money? If the market is such that there is an ROI for telling a global audience about your microbrewery, why not? Most of the tracking issues are IMO about making more inventory available to platforms and have little to do with advertiser needs. I'm not in the business, but I remember in the olden days, the content-centric nature of Google AdWords was the magic. In a perfect world, I'd see ads for brewpubs in my town. The reality is usually some sort of lame Amazon/Ebay/etc retarget attempt. These ads are low value and low revenue -- they are the equivalent of the Karate Dojo in a rundown stripmall.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >It's totally obvious that you don't want to waste money on people who don't drink, don't live in America, or are 12 years old. This is a problem when you're trying to advertise in the garden of the advertiser's own making (ie Facebook). Otherwise, you're not going to be advertising your microbrewery on a children's blog. >but it's completely ridiculous to claim that untargeted ads are even a fraction as good. Advertising has never been truly "untargeted". I think the onus is on the targeted marketers to produce the data that their results are orders of magnitude better.
ucaetano 6y ago
Correlation does not imply causation...
deleted 6y ago
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Deukhoofd 6y ago
I'd really need to see actual numbers for this, especially as this is kind of contrary to the yearly report Ster released two weeks ago. In this they stated that while the first couple months of 2020 were more or less in line with their budget, they dropped to below budget after corona. I have some trouble believing they made a budget based on a 60% increase from the preceding year. https://www.ster.nl/media/2ssmp5p5/ster-jaarverslag_2019.pdf https://www.ster.nl/media/2ssmp5p5/ster-jaarverslag_2019.pdf
- Phemist 6y ago
  Also noteworthy is that the Dutch government has decided to seriously limit the amount of ads on NPO TV channels and websites. No ads before 8 PM on TV, no ads at all on the websites.
  - deugtniet 6y ago
    I don't think they implemented the `no ads before 8PM on tv` yet. I'm actually surprised about how open they are about advertising costs per second for each block on the npo1 channel [1]. [1] https://www.ster.nl/media/rrifn3t0/npo-1-juni-2020-gewijzigd-op-22-juni.pdf https://www.ster.nl/media/rrifn3t0/npo-1-juni-2020-gewijzigd...
    - odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
      I don't speak dutch, but does this mean that cost on average 1000 euros for a 30 second ad? Or is it per minute? (it as 30" on top not sure if it is minimum block you need or per 30 seconds) I would expect a lot more to be honest! (I know it changes and I bet those values around some specific events to be bigger, but still)
      - itcrowd 6y ago
        The price list is indeed for a 30-second television ad. However, it seems like you can't just buy one slot, you need to spend >€30k before they start to do business with you. [in Dutch] https://www.ster.nl/hoe-werkt-het/tv-reclame-bij-ster/ https://www.ster.nl/hoe-werkt-het/tv-reclame-bij-ster/
daneel_w 6y ago
Why does the NPO, the Dutch equivalent to the PBS, even run commercial advertisements? Aren't they funded by the people's taxes?
- polytely 6y ago
  Wikipedia tells me it's mainly funded by tax money 800 millions euros, coming up to about 45 euro per Dutch citizen, with supplemental income from ads (200 million), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_public_broadcasting_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_public_broadcasting_syst...
- fr2null 6y ago
  They are partly funded by people's taxes. Commercials have more restrictions on them than on non-public channels. A maximum of 10% of airtime can be a commercial (on a yearly basis), with a 15% max per day. Commercials can only be before or after a program, not within. And just like commercial channels, you cannot sponsor news programs. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/media-en-publieke-omroep/regels-reclame-publieke-omroep https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/media-en-publieke-o...
- timwaagh 6y ago
  because otherwise we'd pay ourselves blue.
  - daneel_w 6y ago
    With 17 million citizens I think that's unlikely.
- mcv 6y ago
  Yes, but the government doesn't want to spend too much tax money on it, so it operates semi-commercially. I'd rather they cut commercials, cut one of the three channels, and focus on content that the commercial channels can't or won't broadcast with the same level of quality.
Fragoel2 6y ago
I'd need to see the site before and after to confirm but maybe it is due to the faster page load speed? Tracking scripts these days are quite heavy and really affect loading times (especially on mobile)
- soared 6y ago
  If tracking scripts are correctly set up they’re asynchronous and don’t affect load times.
  - ricardo81 6y ago
    They load over the wire quickly though the rendering of them and the jitter they can cause on the page gives the impression the page hasn't loaded.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    Most of them are not though - I see a lot of unminifed JS and CSS
libertine 6y ago
>STER says that non-personalised ads are "just as effective", measured by number of clicks an ad attracts, though the click-through is not a complete analysis of effectiveness. The fight against Google and Facebook (and soon Amazon) is still strong in the trenches. How to fight the massive data hoarders that have no competition, and have their data locked down so no publisher can access it? Well you try to dismiss the value of data. Then they make the mistake of evaluating the effectiveness of ads by the number of clicks and CTR... yeah... big red flag there. It's easy to see a publisher get more money out by cutting out players in the value chain, and probably dropping the bidding of their inventory (doesn't matter if it's on cpm or cpc). The problem always ends up with the inventory left out to be monetized, greed is a hell of a thing...
- krisgenre 6y ago
  >> data locked down so no publisher can access it? Maybe I didn't understand but are you suggesting hoarded data shouldn't be locked down and any publisher should have access to it?
  - libertine 6y ago
    I'm saying that at some point in time, MAYBE, there was the discussion of large media groups to pressure policies to make that data available to them. Thankfully it never happened, and things like GDPR came forward instead.
- osobo 6y ago
  If they measure the number of click-throughs as an absolute and not a percentage, it might very well have been that more ads have been served because there were more online productions or they simply drew in more visitors. I think this is a matter of correlation implying causation.
  - libertine 6y ago
    Clicks and Click-Through-Rate are measures for direct marketing efforts, not advertising as a whole. You can have an effective branding ad and you don't even consider clicks as a main KPI.
deleted 6y ago
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mrweasel 6y ago
It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about. Sure, you may be interested in buying fishing gear, but not while reading an article about Tour De France. One of the reasons Google have been able to make a ton of money on ads on google.com is because they are able to deliver contextual ads based on you search. Google isn't using targeted ads on google.com. Think about that for a second. The worlds most visited site and largest ad company is NOT displaying ads based on tracking users on their own main site. They are showing you contextual ads. Search for "cement" on Google, you're not getting ads for the washing machine you looked at on another site yesterday. Google most likely have the data to target you and show you washing machine ads, but they choose to show you an ad relevant to your search. Are we really surprised that contextual ads might generate more revenue?
- koonsolo 6y ago
  Not to mention that even after you bought the thing, you still see ads everywhere.
  - mojuba 6y ago
    Retargeting is one of the stupidest things on the Internet that actually works, there's statistics on that. The only thing that's stupider is email spam where one hit justifies a million misses. Something similar happens here as I understand it: in one out of N cases you may have added the thing to the shopping cart but didn't pay. Another possibility is that you might actually want to buy another one. Though this leads to comical situations like [1] but advertisers have no time figuring out which items are less likely to be purchased repeatedly. But then you might think of purchasing another toilet seat for your other bathroom after all, so... :) [1] https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096 https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096
- viraptor 6y ago
  > Google isn't using targeted ads on google.com. They sure are targeted. The ads depends on your location, demographic, past browsing, past ad interaction, and many other things. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1704368?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1704368?hl=en They have more context of what you're after and what's more effective + the ad keywords limit the audience. But in your situation if there's any crossover between washing machines and cement that will bring clicks, you can be sure they know about it and will serve it.
annoyingnoob 6y ago
> RTB "is a cancer eating the heart of legitimate media, and a business model for the bottom of the web." RTB is actually a huge waste of power too.
code4tee 6y ago
I’ve always thought that the “advanced tracking” touted by some in AdTech was: 1. Generally not that advanced (yes I searched for hotels in Florida and so yes I’m probably taking a trip to Florida... don’t need fancy ML to figure that out.) 2. Not that smart. (Hey we actually got back from our Florida vacation two months ago... don’t need to keep seeing hotel offers for Florida!) It totally makes sense that just “dumb” targeting (show people adverts related to the content on the page they are currently looking at, which requires no tracking) might actually work better than all the black magic products companies promote.
- afiori 6y ago
  The best argument for the usefulness/profitability of deep tracking is simple statistical inference. As in if there are 10000 people that with browsing patterns similar to yours and non-trivial fraction of them one day show interest in a discount/service/trip then you are also likely to be interested. It is the official explanation of how facebook/google can magically listen to conversation IRL that they were not supposed to hear: we simply are not as unique/unpredictable as we would like to think.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    I think it's one of the best argument against. It was at least 5 years ago when I started to notice businesses "A/B testing themselves to death" — "It makes no common sense, but increases sales," and then it does until it doesn't, and you are left with no idea what your client actually wants, and no idea how to get out of that "A/B tested to absurdity" situation
    - mumblemumble 6y ago
      This also seems to be an inherent danger with thinking that data science == machine learning == AI. I don't want to fundamentally challenge the ŷ-centric approach approach of machine learning. But I do want to say that there's a lot of danger in taking it too far, and thinking that β̂ doesn't matter as long as ŷ is good enough. β̂ has a habit of not mattering until, very suddenly, it really matters quite a lot. And it's even more dangerous to think that an algorithm for generating formulas is somehow doing something intelligent just because you like what you're seeing in the ŷ department.
zaroth 6y ago
In essence they cut out adtech middlemen who rake up to 70% of the ad revenue for themselves to run the real-time bidding which underpins tracking-based ads, and sold less effective content based ads but, by taking the revenue all for themselves, ended up way ahead.
deleted_account 6y ago
This article discusses the Dutch national broadcaster NPO's switch from targeted ads to _contextual_ advertising, placing advertisements based on the content of the publisher site instead of user features of the person reading the page. STER mentioned in the article is NPO's ad agency. The whitepaper is available on STER's site: https://www.ster.nl/onderzoek/een-toekomst-zonder-advertentiecookies-het-kan/ https://www.ster.nl/onderzoek/een-toekomst-zonder-advertenti... I haven't read the whitepaper (waiting on the English language version.) Where the increased revenue is coming from isn't really clear. It seems really unlikely they're increasing revenue by charging more per impression. Cutting out the ad network could make up for it, but then this seems like a case of STER setting itself up as supply platform. It works great for large publishers, but doesn't really scale. Totally related: expect to see more if these articles. The demise of third-party cookies is coming and groups like W3C's Web Advertising Business Group [https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/ https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/] and efforts like Chromium's privacy sandbox [https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...] are picking up steam.
- wastedhours 6y ago
  I still struggle to understand why people seem surprised when contextual advertising works better than targeted. Targeted works on social media because that's the context, the user is looking for a distraction and ads can be as effective a distraction as your aunt's cat. Showing me ads for a new car when I'm reading about a terrorist attack is just the stupidest thing I can imagine. There's no context, no intent. If I'm on a car site reading about the best new hot hatches and you show me an ad for your new hot hatch, then that's a whole different scenario. It doesn't "scale", but advertisers get higher intent traffic, publishers can charge a higher premium, and the ads feel native so the customers might actually appreciate them. The extra effort is worth it.
  - abakker 6y ago
    OOC, what does "Scale" even mean here? is the OP saying you cannot infinitely serve ads because a given piece of content only attracts a finite number of viewers? or that there are a finite number of subject for a piece of content that can have relevant ads served? To borrow your terrorist example, presumably there are no advertisers (that we permit and condone) who would like to advertise terrorism related products? Do we have any reasonable numbers for what portion of actual web traffic is related to either product/service research or future purchase plans? My impression of my own browsing traffic is that it is probably about 50% by number of page loads.
halflings 6y ago
I don't get why people are viewing user-based and content-based signals as two totally separate things. Aren't most ad providers using both to serve ads? Some people here are saying of course basing ads on the page will work better, and hence tracking cookies (or for some, even ML/AI) are useless... if that was the case, why are all these different players building all this infrastructure and developing these complex models? Just for fun? Clearly, knowing that this is an article about pets helps. But knowing that you've been specifically reading articles about dog food gives you that extra information to serve particularly relevant ads (rather than say, display hamster cages).
wolco 6y ago
As an old time adsense publisher I remember when they made the switch. Everyone revenue/click rate dropped. I thought perhaps in time this would improve but it kept dropping. I guess google believed they could sell more to ad buyers with an ml approach regardless of the results.
JJMcJ 6y ago
"Targeted ads" - hmm. Real galaxy brain stuff. Not me but read a few days ago, someone (male) did a search for pages on the Battle Of Quatre Bras (part of the Battle Of Waterloo). You guessed it, now he is seeing ads for brassieres all the time and someone is paying for those ads to appear.
teekert 6y ago
My favorite Dutch blog, tweakers.net, also does personal ads. I never ever clicked on them, I don't know what they are smoking to conclude that I'm interested in what they offer. They also have a "pricewatch" section, and boy have I clicked on their recommendations often. They are usually spot on! Of course they are contextual and geared to what I want to buy and searched for. If only they'd do the same with their news articles.
jeffbee 6y ago
Everybody knows that bad targeting and bad ad quality results in a temporary bump in revenue. This is because there are short-term quality assumptions baked into the advertisers' bids. Eventually the bad quality cycles back through the market and prices fall. Within Google I saw several post-mortem reports where the "impact" was extra revenue, not lost revenue. As in, due to an outage of the xyz subsystem, we booked an extra $$/minute of ads revenue. Everyone knows this is bad, not good.
egypturnash 6y ago
I don’t understand what is going on with the graph they present at all. What is the cyan line? What are the bubbles with percentage changes in them? Why is there a “+18%” bubble right after the huge dip in the cyan line past the “Covid market shock” label? I think the bubbles are maybe “revenue increase per month” but what the hell is the cyan line? LABEL YOUR GRAPHS PEOPLE
orijing 6y ago
If this were true, why would anyone choose the option that generates lower revenues?
- Barrin92 6y ago
  hype and a huge amount of fancy jobs at stake who know how to keep themselves employed. Take another example, Cambridge Analytica's "psychographic targeting". There's no solid scientific evidence that it actually works. Yet the media and press, as well as CA themselves have somehow convinced themselves that they're the real world version of James Bond's spectre

349 points by paol 6y ago

Presumably because the ads are already hyper targeted, because the site is written in Dutch! Now imagine you run an English ad for say, a local micro brewery in LA. It's totally obvious that you don't want to waste money on people who don't drink, don't live in America, or are 12 years old. Clearly there's significant diminishing returns to how specifically you target, but it's completely ridiculous to claim that untargeted ads are even a fraction as good.

Retric 6y ago
It better for the people buying advertising is not the same thing as better for people selling advertising.
- amadeuspagel 6y ago
  Yes it is. The people selling advertising aren't stupid.
  - zeepzeep 6y ago
    The smartest people in the world are trying to get you to click on an ad. Imagine what they could do.
  - Retric 6y ago
    It’s a question of how informed buyers are as information asymmetry often works in the sellers favor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry It might not always be true in every case, but in this specific case it seems to be.
    - amadeuspagel 6y ago
      But in this case, the buyer can buy from many other sellers, where they get the information they want.
      - Retric 6y ago
        A segment of buyers may make that choice, but they don’t have to sell to every buyer. And again, the data backs up the assertion.
mfontani 6y ago
I think the implication is that using the context of the page to serve ads to users (i.e. you're reading an article on beer, so I'm serving you an ad about beers) is better than using context about the user to serve ads (i.e. you're reading an article about beers, and I'm serving you ads about that one item you've searched on Amazon last week).
- aequitas 6y ago
  > and I'm serving you ads about that one item you've searched on Amazon last week) As a side note, Amazon is not that big yet in the Netherlands so it would probably be something searched on Bol.com. The problem I'm having with ads nowadays, besides that they are indeed often out of context, is that they are far to late and outdated. Because most times advertisements for a product start to appear when I already bought said item. So for me if they do tracing in a sense I'd rather have them double down on it and provide real 'value' to me in their ads. But I still prefer no tracking at all.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
    But they can’t predict the future so the ads will always be bad. Targeted ads would probably work best in categories of things that you buy regularly, like snacks. I’m not sure how they’d get that sort of information though.
    - fendy3002 6y ago
      Or restaurants / food chains. One for sure is to target people (esp teenagers / working age) who search for malls, parks or shopping districts.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > Targeted ads would probably work best in categories of things that you buy regularly, like snacks. If you show me an ad for something I already buy regularly, are you hoping it will cause me to increase my habitual amount? That doesn't really sound like an effective ad.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
learnstats2 6y ago
Are you trying to say that the 24 million Dutch-speaking people are all adults who drink?
- eru 6y ago
  Some of them are children who drink. (But they can only drink in private with eg their parents. Purchases are limited to 18+ year olds.)
  - irishsultan 6y ago
    16+ year olds for about 6 million speakers of Dutch
    - eru 6y ago
      They recently changed the law and increased minimum purchasing age to 18.
      - irishsultan 6y ago
        Not according to this site: https://www.vlaanderen.be/regels-voor-verkoop-van-alcohol https://www.vlaanderen.be/regels-voor-verkoop-van-alcohol
        eru 6y ago
        That's a Belgian site. I am going by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_drinking_age and their sources. If that's wrong, please correct the Wikipedia page.
        irishsultan 6y ago
        I was talking about Belgium (note how that site is in Dutch and the number of 6 million approx. matches the number of people speaking Dutch in Belgium, while it doesn't match the number of people speaking Dutch in the Netherlands at all).
simias 6y ago
The Nederlands are obviously tiny compared to the USA but an untargetted ad for a micro-brewery in Rotterdam is going to have a massive miss ratio. "People who speak Dutch" is in no way "hyper targeted".
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Exactly you have to consider Flemish speakers in Belgium and you might even have a nl-nl page and be-nl page. Flemish doesn't have it's own language code BTW
treeman79 6y ago
Often hyper targeted ads are effective but the ad manager can’t spend their budget due to small audience size. Also anti bot tactics will cut down on ads served. Sometimes manager is willing to lose efficiency for more overall exposure.
contravariant 6y ago
There's a pretty significant difference between tracking and targetting. It's pretty easy to limit an ad to a geographic area and target audience (to some degree of accuracy), you don't need to store any personal information to achieve this. However that is very different from tracking someone's identity to figure out their date of birth, nationality, and whether they drink alcohol.
brnt 6y ago
The Netherlands are small, but not that small ;) Not all New Yorkers will be lumped in a single group either, right?
levosmetalo 6y ago
If top HN comment completely misses the point on targeting and shows zero understanding what does it mean, and also considers "site is in Dutch" as "hyper targeted" what chance have an average marketer to properly set targeting goal for an ad? Average site can profit more from untargeted ads than from the wrongly targeted ads set by the "ad experts", especialy after saving the costs of hiring such "experts".
- libertine 6y ago
  Funny or not, you have to take into account HN context (ah!), where the great majority of users thinks marketing is a scam and hate advertising (here comes the downvotes...) - and they have reasons to feel like that. We've been flooded by bad professionals that give a bad rep to the craft. They can profit more because they don't need any third party tech provider that take bites out of their inventory margin, or are not being forced into bidding their inventory and they set the prices they want. It's smart on the publisher part, but they end up falling into 3rd parties because of the times they have inventory not being monetized (money lost).
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    That's the concerning part. For centuries publications sourced ads to finance them just by themselves. But suddenly we got those worldwide ad auction houses that monopolize the market, and now nobody can source their own ads anymore, because the buyers are all on the auction houses. They shouldn't have more unsold inventory than if they got the alternative.
    - Spooky23 6y ago
      You make a good point about the marketplace dictating the market. In my hometown there is a weekly newspaper that is still going strong, that can support a half dozen employees, etc. All with direct ads for B2C and B2B local businesses and legal notices. It's interesting, as that business model would absolutely not work with an online platform, as it's a general interest publication that's highly local. There's no way for the local high-tensile fence contractor or well digger to generate ROI on Google. Ditto with the supermarket -- the weekly ad in the Sunday paper is very effective IMO, and superior to the online presentation in almost every way.
edoloughlin 6y ago
Presumably because the ads are already hyper targeted, because the site is written in Dutch! Presumably the site was also written in Dutch before they stopped tracking users?
rightbyte 6y ago
You need to take into account what Google charges for giving you the opportunity for somewhat accurately targeted ads. Clearly, it can be cheaper to just show ads for everyone if Googles fees are to high for the value Google provide.
Spooky23 6y ago
Why would it be a waste of money? If the market is such that there is an ROI for telling a global audience about your microbrewery, why not? Most of the tracking issues are IMO about making more inventory available to platforms and have little to do with advertiser needs. I'm not in the business, but I remember in the olden days, the content-centric nature of Google AdWords was the magic. In a perfect world, I'd see ads for brewpubs in my town. The reality is usually some sort of lame Amazon/Ebay/etc retarget attempt. These ads are low value and low revenue -- they are the equivalent of the Karate Dojo in a rundown stripmall.
itsoktocry 6y ago
>It's totally obvious that you don't want to waste money on people who don't drink, don't live in America, or are 12 years old. This is a problem when you're trying to advertise in the garden of the advertiser's own making (ie Facebook). Otherwise, you're not going to be advertising your microbrewery on a children's blog. >but it's completely ridiculous to claim that untargeted ads are even a fraction as good. Advertising has never been truly "untargeted". I think the onus is on the targeted marketers to produce the data that their results are orders of magnitude better.

ucaetano 6y ago

Correlation does not imply causation...

deleted 6y ago

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Deukhoofd 6y ago

I'd really need to see actual numbers for this, especially as this is kind of contrary to the yearly report Ster released two weeks ago. In this they stated that while the first couple months of 2020 were more or less in line with their budget, they dropped to below budget after corona. I have some trouble believing they made a budget based on a 60% increase from the preceding year. https://www.ster.nl/media/2ssmp5p5/ster-jaarverslag_2019.pdf https://www.ster.nl/media/2ssmp5p5/ster-jaarverslag_2019.pdf

Phemist 6y ago
Also noteworthy is that the Dutch government has decided to seriously limit the amount of ads on NPO TV channels and websites. No ads before 8 PM on TV, no ads at all on the websites.
- deugtniet 6y ago
  I don't think they implemented the `no ads before 8PM on tv` yet. I'm actually surprised about how open they are about advertising costs per second for each block on the npo1 channel [1]. [1] https://www.ster.nl/media/rrifn3t0/npo-1-juni-2020-gewijzigd-op-22-juni.pdf https://www.ster.nl/media/rrifn3t0/npo-1-juni-2020-gewijzigd...
  - odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
    I don't speak dutch, but does this mean that cost on average 1000 euros for a 30 second ad? Or is it per minute? (it as 30" on top not sure if it is minimum block you need or per 30 seconds) I would expect a lot more to be honest! (I know it changes and I bet those values around some specific events to be bigger, but still)
    - itcrowd 6y ago
      The price list is indeed for a 30-second television ad. However, it seems like you can't just buy one slot, you need to spend >€30k before they start to do business with you. [in Dutch] https://www.ster.nl/hoe-werkt-het/tv-reclame-bij-ster/ https://www.ster.nl/hoe-werkt-het/tv-reclame-bij-ster/

daneel_w 6y ago

Why does the NPO, the Dutch equivalent to the PBS, even run commercial advertisements? Aren't they funded by the people's taxes?

polytely 6y ago
Wikipedia tells me it's mainly funded by tax money 800 millions euros, coming up to about 45 euro per Dutch citizen, with supplemental income from ads (200 million), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_public_broadcasting_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_public_broadcasting_syst...
fr2null 6y ago
They are partly funded by people's taxes. Commercials have more restrictions on them than on non-public channels. A maximum of 10% of airtime can be a commercial (on a yearly basis), with a 15% max per day. Commercials can only be before or after a program, not within. And just like commercial channels, you cannot sponsor news programs. https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/media-en-publieke-omroep/regels-reclame-publieke-omroep https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/media-en-publieke-o...
timwaagh 6y ago
because otherwise we'd pay ourselves blue.
- daneel_w 6y ago
  With 17 million citizens I think that's unlikely.
mcv 6y ago
Yes, but the government doesn't want to spend too much tax money on it, so it operates semi-commercially. I'd rather they cut commercials, cut one of the three channels, and focus on content that the commercial channels can't or won't broadcast with the same level of quality.

Fragoel2 6y ago

I'd need to see the site before and after to confirm but maybe it is due to the faster page load speed? Tracking scripts these days are quite heavy and really affect loading times (especially on mobile)

soared 6y ago
If tracking scripts are correctly set up they’re asynchronous and don’t affect load times.
- ricardo81 6y ago
  They load over the wire quickly though the rendering of them and the jitter they can cause on the page gives the impression the page hasn't loaded.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Most of them are not though - I see a lot of unminifed JS and CSS

libertine 6y ago

>STER says that non-personalised ads are "just as effective", measured by number of clicks an ad attracts, though the click-through is not a complete analysis of effectiveness. The fight against Google and Facebook (and soon Amazon) is still strong in the trenches. How to fight the massive data hoarders that have no competition, and have their data locked down so no publisher can access it? Well you try to dismiss the value of data. Then they make the mistake of evaluating the effectiveness of ads by the number of clicks and CTR... yeah... big red flag there. It's easy to see a publisher get more money out by cutting out players in the value chain, and probably dropping the bidding of their inventory (doesn't matter if it's on cpm or cpc). The problem always ends up with the inventory left out to be monetized, greed is a hell of a thing...

krisgenre 6y ago
>> data locked down so no publisher can access it? Maybe I didn't understand but are you suggesting hoarded data shouldn't be locked down and any publisher should have access to it?
- libertine 6y ago
  I'm saying that at some point in time, MAYBE, there was the discussion of large media groups to pressure policies to make that data available to them. Thankfully it never happened, and things like GDPR came forward instead.
osobo 6y ago
If they measure the number of click-throughs as an absolute and not a percentage, it might very well have been that more ads have been served because there were more online productions or they simply drew in more visitors. I think this is a matter of correlation implying causation.
- libertine 6y ago
  Clicks and Click-Through-Rate are measures for direct marketing efforts, not advertising as a whole. You can have an effective branding ad and you don't even consider clicks as a main KPI.

deleted 6y ago

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mrweasel 6y ago

It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about. Sure, you may be interested in buying fishing gear, but not while reading an article about Tour De France. One of the reasons Google have been able to make a ton of money on ads on google.com is because they are able to deliver contextual ads based on you search. Google isn't using targeted ads on google.com. Think about that for a second. The worlds most visited site and largest ad company is NOT displaying ads based on tracking users on their own main site. They are showing you contextual ads. Search for "cement" on Google, you're not getting ads for the washing machine you looked at on another site yesterday. Google most likely have the data to target you and show you washing machine ads, but they choose to show you an ad relevant to your search. Are we really surprised that contextual ads might generate more revenue?

koonsolo 6y ago
Not to mention that even after you bought the thing, you still see ads everywhere.
- mojuba 6y ago
  Retargeting is one of the stupidest things on the Internet that actually works, there's statistics on that. The only thing that's stupider is email spam where one hit justifies a million misses. Something similar happens here as I understand it: in one out of N cases you may have added the thing to the shopping cart but didn't pay. Another possibility is that you might actually want to buy another one. Though this leads to comical situations like [1] but advertisers have no time figuring out which items are less likely to be purchased repeatedly. But then you might think of purchasing another toilet seat for your other bathroom after all, so... :) [1] https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096 https://twitter.com/GirlFromBlupo/status/982156453396996096
viraptor 6y ago
> Google isn't using targeted ads on google.com. They sure are targeted. The ads depends on your location, demographic, past browsing, past ad interaction, and many other things. https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1704368?hl=en https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1704368?hl=en They have more context of what you're after and what's more effective + the ad keywords limit the audience. But in your situation if there's any crossover between washing machines and cement that will bring clicks, you can be sure they know about it and will serve it.

annoyingnoob 6y ago

> RTB "is a cancer eating the heart of legitimate media, and a business model for the bottom of the web." RTB is actually a huge waste of power too.

code4tee 6y ago

I’ve always thought that the “advanced tracking” touted by some in AdTech was: 1. Generally not that advanced (yes I searched for hotels in Florida and so yes I’m probably taking a trip to Florida... don’t need fancy ML to figure that out.) 2. Not that smart. (Hey we actually got back from our Florida vacation two months ago... don’t need to keep seeing hotel offers for Florida!) It totally makes sense that just “dumb” targeting (show people adverts related to the content on the page they are currently looking at, which requires no tracking) might actually work better than all the black magic products companies promote.

afiori 6y ago
The best argument for the usefulness/profitability of deep tracking is simple statistical inference. As in if there are 10000 people that with browsing patterns similar to yours and non-trivial fraction of them one day show interest in a discount/service/trip then you are also likely to be interested. It is the official explanation of how facebook/google can magically listen to conversation IRL that they were not supposed to hear: we simply are not as unique/unpredictable as we would like to think.
- baybal2 6y ago
  I think it's one of the best argument against. It was at least 5 years ago when I started to notice businesses "A/B testing themselves to death" — "It makes no common sense, but increases sales," and then it does until it doesn't, and you are left with no idea what your client actually wants, and no idea how to get out of that "A/B tested to absurdity" situation
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    This also seems to be an inherent danger with thinking that data science == machine learning == AI. I don't want to fundamentally challenge the ŷ-centric approach approach of machine learning. But I do want to say that there's a lot of danger in taking it too far, and thinking that β̂ doesn't matter as long as ŷ is good enough. β̂ has a habit of not mattering until, very suddenly, it really matters quite a lot. And it's even more dangerous to think that an algorithm for generating formulas is somehow doing something intelligent just because you like what you're seeing in the ŷ department.

zaroth 6y ago

In essence they cut out adtech middlemen who rake up to 70% of the ad revenue for themselves to run the real-time bidding which underpins tracking-based ads, and sold less effective content based ads but, by taking the revenue all for themselves, ended up way ahead.

deleted_account 6y ago

This article discusses the Dutch national broadcaster NPO's switch from targeted ads to _contextual_ advertising, placing advertisements based on the content of the publisher site instead of user features of the person reading the page. STER mentioned in the article is NPO's ad agency. The whitepaper is available on STER's site: https://www.ster.nl/onderzoek/een-toekomst-zonder-advertentiecookies-het-kan/ https://www.ster.nl/onderzoek/een-toekomst-zonder-advertenti... I haven't read the whitepaper (waiting on the English language version.) Where the increased revenue is coming from isn't really clear. It seems really unlikely they're increasing revenue by charging more per impression. Cutting out the ad network could make up for it, but then this seems like a case of STER setting itself up as supply platform. It works great for large publishers, but doesn't really scale. Totally related: expect to see more if these articles. The demise of third-party cookies is coming and groups like W3C's Web Advertising Business Group [https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/ https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/] and efforts like Chromium's privacy sandbox [https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandbox https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...] are picking up steam.

wastedhours 6y ago
I still struggle to understand why people seem surprised when contextual advertising works better than targeted. Targeted works on social media because that's the context, the user is looking for a distraction and ads can be as effective a distraction as your aunt's cat. Showing me ads for a new car when I'm reading about a terrorist attack is just the stupidest thing I can imagine. There's no context, no intent. If I'm on a car site reading about the best new hot hatches and you show me an ad for your new hot hatch, then that's a whole different scenario. It doesn't "scale", but advertisers get higher intent traffic, publishers can charge a higher premium, and the ads feel native so the customers might actually appreciate them. The extra effort is worth it.
- abakker 6y ago
  OOC, what does "Scale" even mean here? is the OP saying you cannot infinitely serve ads because a given piece of content only attracts a finite number of viewers? or that there are a finite number of subject for a piece of content that can have relevant ads served? To borrow your terrorist example, presumably there are no advertisers (that we permit and condone) who would like to advertise terrorism related products? Do we have any reasonable numbers for what portion of actual web traffic is related to either product/service research or future purchase plans? My impression of my own browsing traffic is that it is probably about 50% by number of page loads.

halflings 6y ago

I don't get why people are viewing user-based and content-based signals as two totally separate things. Aren't most ad providers using both to serve ads? Some people here are saying of course basing ads on the page will work better, and hence tracking cookies (or for some, even ML/AI) are useless... if that was the case, why are all these different players building all this infrastructure and developing these complex models? Just for fun? Clearly, knowing that this is an article about pets helps. But knowing that you've been specifically reading articles about dog food gives you that extra information to serve particularly relevant ads (rather than say, display hamster cages).

wolco 6y ago

As an old time adsense publisher I remember when they made the switch. Everyone revenue/click rate dropped. I thought perhaps in time this would improve but it kept dropping. I guess google believed they could sell more to ad buyers with an ml approach regardless of the results.

JJMcJ 6y ago

"Targeted ads" - hmm. Real galaxy brain stuff. Not me but read a few days ago, someone (male) did a search for pages on the Battle Of Quatre Bras (part of the Battle Of Waterloo). You guessed it, now he is seeing ads for brassieres all the time and someone is paying for those ads to appear.

teekert 6y ago

My favorite Dutch blog, tweakers.net, also does personal ads. I never ever clicked on them, I don't know what they are smoking to conclude that I'm interested in what they offer. They also have a "pricewatch" section, and boy have I clicked on their recommendations often. They are usually spot on! Of course they are contextual and geared to what I want to buy and searched for. If only they'd do the same with their news articles.

jeffbee 6y ago

Everybody knows that bad targeting and bad ad quality results in a temporary bump in revenue. This is because there are short-term quality assumptions baked into the advertisers' bids. Eventually the bad quality cycles back through the market and prices fall. Within Google I saw several post-mortem reports where the "impact" was extra revenue, not lost revenue. As in, due to an outage of the xyz subsystem, we booked an extra $$/minute of ads revenue. Everyone knows this is bad, not good.

egypturnash 6y ago

I don’t understand what is going on with the graph they present at all. What is the cyan line? What are the bubbles with percentage changes in them? Why is there a “+18%” bubble right after the huge dip in the cyan line past the “Covid market shock” label? I think the bubbles are maybe “revenue increase per month” but what the hell is the cyan line? LABEL YOUR GRAPHS PEOPLE

orijing 6y ago

If this were true, why would anyone choose the option that generates lower revenues?

Barrin92 6y ago
hype and a huge amount of fancy jobs at stake who know how to keep themselves employed. Take another example, Cambridge Analytica's "psychographic targeting". There's no solid scientific evidence that it actually works. Yet the media and press, as well as CA themselves have somehow convinced themselves that they're the real world version of James Bond's spectre